HTTP checks from the US nodes issue a full GET request and report the HTTP status code, response time, and whether the server returned a complete response. This covers DNS resolution, TCP handshake, TLS negotiation, and time to first byte — the full chain a real user request traverses. For any target running a CDN with US PoPs (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront), responses from all three US nodes should complete in under 30 ms. For bare origin servers outside the US, add round-trip latency on top of server processing time.

The three US nodes reflect different regional user bases. Kansas City is representative of central US broadband users routing through mid-continent backbones. Dallas reflects south-central US and US-Mexico border region traffic patterns. Miami reflects southeastern US users and is the closest US node to Latin American origin servers. If your service is US-focused, HTTP test times from all three nodes together give you a realistic picture of regional performance spread without requiring a CDN audit.

Unexpected HTTP failures from US nodes without corresponding failures from European or APAC nodes usually indicate geo-blocking, US-specific WAF rules, or rate limiting applied to hosting AS source IPs. AS202673, AS201129, and AS22295 are all hosting ASNs — some application firewalls and bot mitigation systems apply stricter rules to hosting-range IPs than to residential ISP IPs. If you see 403 or 429 responses from the US nodes but not from other regions, the WAF configuration is likely the cause.

The US internet backbone is anchored in Ashburn, Virginia, where Equinix operates the largest concentration of interconnected networks in the country. Over 500 networks peer at the Equinix campus in Ashburn, including AT&T (AS7018), Comcast (AS7922), Lumen/CenturyLink (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT (AS2914). The density of peering there means that a packet originating in Miami or Dallas often transits through Ashburn before exiting to Europe, making it the effective default gateway for US-to-Europe traffic regardless of where the origin server sits.

Our US nodes span three cities across the South, Central, and Midwest regions. Miami runs on AS202673 (Ohz Digital SL) and is the southernmost probe — useful for measuring connectivity relevant to Latin American networks and Caribbean-facing services. Dallas runs on AS201129 (Linceris International Cloud) at Dallas DC, positioned at the intersection of south-central US routes with good proximity to both Equinix Dallas peering and central US backbone routes. Kansas City runs on AS22295 (Advin Services LLC / Tierhive) in the Midwest, providing a third vantage point with direct access to central US carrier paths.

Reference RTTs from these nodes under normal load: Miami to London is approximately 120 ms, Miami to São Paulo around 85 ms. Dallas to Frankfurt typically runs 130–135 ms via transatlantic submarine cables landing on the US East Coast. Kansas City to New York is roughly 35 ms, and Kansas City to Los Angeles is in the 40–45 ms range. These figures vary by carrier — Cogent and Lumen have different peering strategies at Ashburn, which produces measurably different latency for the same destination depending on which AS the probe exits through.

Key US transit providers reachable from all three nodes include AT&T (AS7018), Comcast Business (AS7922), Lumen (AS3356), Cogent (AS174), and NTT America (AS2914). These five carriers collectively carry the majority of US internet traffic and each maintains presence in Dallas, Kansas City, and Miami in addition to Ashburn. At the IX level, DE-CIX New York and NYIIX serve the Northeast corridor. Equinix Dallas and CoreSite serve south-central US. Miami is served by the NAP of the Americas facility, a major Latin America-facing interconnect point operated by Equinix.

Running checks across all three US nodes simultaneously provides geographic diversity within a single country that matters. A server hosted on AWS us-east-1 will show different RTTs from Miami (via southeast paths), Dallas (via south-central), and Kansas City (via central US backbone). A CDN with US PoPs should show low single-digit or sub-10ms results from all three. If one node shows significantly higher latency than the others, the routing from that city or the serving carrier is suboptimal for that node's upstream transit mix.